The bandwidth of mobile broadband has seen exponential improvements over the past decades. However, due to the infrastructure behind mobile broadband technologies (e.g., 2G GSM/GPRS/EDGE, 3G WCDMA/HSPA+/DC-HSPA+, 4G LTE/WiMAX, etc.), they have always been and continue to be far slower and far more expensive per-Gigabyte-of-usage than wired Internet access technologies (e.g., ADSL, VDSL, Cable, Fibre-optic). Mobile broadband technologies transport Internet traffic via a subset of the radio spectrum. Only relatively narrow portions of the entire radio spectrum have conventionally been reserved for consumer mobile broadband technologies, and obtaining the legal rights to transmit and receive on said portions of the radio spectrum has conventionally been an extremely expensive process. Furthermore, the disjoint portions of radio spectrum, called “frequency bands”, reserved for consumer mobile broadband technologies (e.g., 800 Mhz band, 2100 Mhz band, 2600 Mhz band, etc.) are fractured into disjoint “frequency band channels”. These factors contribute to the relatively low bandwidths and high prices of mobile broadband technologies in comparison to wired Internet access technologies. A very limiting factor to the bandwidth of any mobile broadband technology is the width of the conventionally narrow frequency band channel it operates on. Modern research into improving mobile broadband technologies revolves around altering mobile broadband infrastructures (and consequently any device intended to access said infrastructures) in order to support the utilization of multiple of the limited frequency band channels simultaneously by a single device, and improving the efficiency of data transport and signal encoding techniques. Both approaches are conventionally extremely costly and lengthy to deploy given that software and/or hardware modifications need to be physically carried out at every single cellular base station. Moreover, only the latest of consumer devices can conventionally make use of the latest mobile broadband technologies. Mobile broadband technologies do hold some advantages over wired Internet access technologies though: they are conventionally already available and/or less costly to deploy in rural areas, in developing countries, in moving vehicles, etc.; all contexts where wired Internet access technologies are often either challengingly expensive or downright impossible to deploy and/or maintain.
Merging the bandwidths of multiple network connections has been a topic of academic and commercial research for decades. Merged network connections can offer higher-bandwidth and increased robustness to individual connection failures. Numerous software and hardware, academic and commercial “connection-merging solutions” have been invented which offer varying levels of improved bandwidth and/or reliability, and varying levels of support for transporting existing network protocols (e.g., TCP, UDP, ICMP, etc.). However, a common and seemingly unavoidable limitation across all solutions is that end-points (e.g., communicating client devices and application servers) must undergo software and/or hardware upgrades to support the connection-merging solutions. Some efforts have proposed solutions where portions of the network infrastructure between end-points undergo software and/or hardware upgrades to enable the end-points to benefit from merged network connections without being altered themselves. These solutions are conventionally not portable, are limited in scope and flexibility, and do not scale to real world scenarios where client devices and application servers may be geographically scattered and exist in arbitrarily high numbers.
So-called MiFi devices and mobile broadband USB adapters (e.g., 3G/4G USB adapters) bring the ubiquitous and portable properties of mobile broadband technologies to non-mobile-broadband-enabled devices (e.g., laptop computers, desktop computers, tablets), enabling said devices to access the Internet over mobile broadband infrastructures via a peripheral device. While numerous MiFi devices and mobile broadband USB adapters exist, they conventionally do not support or include any form of Internet connection merging.